Certain ideals are expected to be embodied by male and female characters for them to be seen as attractive to the opposite sex. Sexy female characters are physically desirable; Sexy male characters are strong and proactive. This is a consequence of Men Act, Women Are as applied to sex appeal: A woman's attractiveness is mostly due to her passive physical attributes, while a man's attractiveness is mostly a result of his behavior.

For female characters, passivity does not detract from their attractiveness. In extreme cases, female characters who are very active will be seen as undesirable, or that they can only love a man strongerthan themselves. Furthermore, a physically unattractive woman will always be unattractive regardless of how proactive she is. Male characters are viewed as less attractive if they are passive. In fact a dynamicevil man is more likely to be viewed as attractive than a decent but weak man. A physically unattractive man's dynamic qualities can also make him more attractive.

In summary, physical attractiveness only ever adds to a woman's sex appeal while being active may or may not detract. Whereas for men being proactive only ever adds to a man's sex appeal while being physically attractive may or may not add to his desirability.

These differing standards lead to the genders being held to equally damaging but different standards of attractiveness and have numerous Unfortunate Implications.

For women the implication is that your actions are irrelevant to your attractiveness to the opposite sex. As long as you're beautiful, even if you're 105 lbs of useless deadweight or a complete and utter bitch you're still desirable. And if you're not born beautiful enough, no matter what you do, Failure Is the Only Option for you.

The Unfortunate Implications for men is that men are shallow and only after one thing, thus they don't care if a woman is a dynamic, active character, and that women have no worth beyond their looks. Also, male characters will end up pulling more than their own weight, emotionally and physically, in works where this trope is in effect.

Specific Examples:

The author of Rurouni Kenshin, Nobuhiro Watsuki, believes that men should be strong and women, cute. There are few, if any, women able to fight any Big Bads or against Kenshin and his team. Though in Kaoru's case it isn't so much that she's weak, but that everyone else is too strong.

Played With in the original the Marvel Family: all three members had Strength, Wisdom and Speed, but while Billy and Freddie also had Stamina, Power and Bravery, Mary's additional powers were Beauty, Grace and Skill. Averted in the Post-Crisis reimagining, where the three all had the same powers from the same (male) benefactors.

In the second edition of Fantasy Hero for the Hero System, there was a description of what it meant to have a characteristic higher than 20: "Songs are written about the man with 25 Strength or the woman with 24 Comeliness."

The reason why the first man and woman in Philippine Mythology are named Malakas and Maganda respectively as they were born on split bamboo.

Other

The official motto of the State of Maryland is Fatti maschii, parole femine:* Italian speakers: The spelling is correct, but archaic. "Manly deeds, womanly words." (Some higher-ups became uncomfortable with the outdated connotations, and changed the official translation to "Strong deeds, gentle words," but this doesn't really change the basic facts...)

Inversions:

High School Debut: Haruna, the female lead, is defined mostly by her strength and athleticism (her looks are merely average). Yoh, the male lead, is known for his attractiveness, and it's the first thing people comment on when meeting him for the first time.

In WALL•E, while pretty much every robot featured is adorable, EVE is the one who does a whole lot more for the sake of her boyfriend and her directive/career, while WALL•E himself is pretty much thrust into situations he shouldn't be in for the sake of a romantic partner. Technically they both have No Biological Sex, but for audience purposes they are fairly obviously gendered.

The world of A Brother's Price features a broad Stereotype Flip of most gender roles, set in an analogue of the nineteenth century. Therefore the noted attributes of women are strength, confidence, intelligence, competence etc, with ugliness being a detriment but fairly minor, but although men are expected to be able to run a household and raise children their beauty is extremely important.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy